Quote Originally Posted by xVeinx View Post
I found this article to be interesting. If bulldozer is struggling with floats, then we have trouble ahead. Integer workloads are incredibly important for many tasks, but floating point can't be ignored. Sticking these into a Cray won't be very useful with poor float performance . Any ideas why this might be the case? Mostly I'm curious as to whether this is the performance issue or the bug (or both) that they talk about. My guess is that the performance is lacking in floats due to heat. The FMAC is shared, and probably gets crispy in large workloads while integer units are more evenly distributed about the core...
I doubt that this is a temperature problem.

Have a look at the module:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02...er_core_isscc/

The module's two 128b FMAC units (each actually consisting of two 64b/80b FMAC units) are sitting on the left and right ends of the FPU area. You can see the split register file (bright rectangles).

So those possible hot spots are as far apart from eachother as possible in the given area - about as far as the integer execution units of both cores (in the upper parts of the int cores):